News of newly discovered exoplanets is becoming almost commonplace, but actual pictures of exoplanets? That’s still a rarity. A paper just out contains not one, not two, but three new images of exoplanets orbiting distant stars.

The vast majority of exoplanet identifications are made by observing the effect they have on their stars. For example, the small counterbalance wobble of a star as planets zip around it can be detected with sensitive instruments. The tiny drops in luminosity as planets pass in front of a star’s disk is also a telltale sign.

The problem with actually getting images of planets is that stars are much brighter than planets, but there are some circumstances that allow us to pick them out with infrared imaging. All three planets from the paper are large gas giants, which certainly helps us see them. They are also orbiting fairly far out from cooler young stars.

FW Tau is a binary star system about 470 light years from Earth. Both stars are on the young side — 2 million years old or so. That makes the planet, FW Tau b much easier to see. It’s still warm itself from formation and is 10 times the mass of Jupiter. This planet orbits the binary stars at a distance of 50 billion kilometers, or roughly 10 times farther out than Neptune from our sun.

ROXs 42B is also a binary star system with small, young stars that don’t put out as much light as the sun. ROXs 42B b was detected in this system 390 light years away because it too is big, warm, and orbiting far from its stars. It’s 11 times the mass of Jupiter, give or take, and sits 22 billion kilometers from the stars.

The first two planets are toward the large end to actually be called planets, but they definitely fit in that category. The third exoplanet might not hold up to scrutiny in that respect. In the ROXs 12 system, astronomers have taken an image of a planet some 16 times the mass of Jupiter 31 billion kilometers from its small red dwarf star. There is some wiggle room in that estimate, which could put it squarely in the planet category at the low end, or the brown dwarf one at the high end. Whether or not ROXs 12 b is a brown dwarf star or a planet, it took plenty of careful work to snap a picture of.

As a pretty cool bonus, both FW Tau b and ROXs 12 b have a lot of hydrogen around them, as detected by absorbance spectra. That means they’re still siphoning off matter from a disk of material, getting even larger by the minute. We’re getting better at this planet spotting thing.